Google AdSense Tips

Many of the pages on this site display text
ads from Google's AdWords program. To display these ads, a site
must join Google's AdSense
program. Joining is free, but not all sites are eligible to join.
Once you're accepted, however, it's very simple to place the ads
on your pages and to start generating revenue for your site.
AdSense will serve ads that are generally very relevant to the
content of a particular page.
Here are some tips based on my experiences so far with the AdSense
program.

Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages.

When I reworked my site, I built a skeleton set of pages
that had no content, just titles and some meta tags. I displayed
ads on those pages, however. Although all you see are public
service ads at first, the very act of displaying ads on a page
causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page
for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin
showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly.

If you don't have any content, then, Google will have to
guess as what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and
so the ads that it displays may not be relevant. You'll
have to wait until Google re-crawls the site for the
ads to correct themselves. Here is what Google had
to say when I asked them about how often the AdSense
crawler updates a site:

Thank you for taking the time to update your site. New ads will start
appearing on your site the next time our crawler re-indexes your site.
Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to control how often our
crawlers index the content on your site.

Crawling is done automatically by our bots. When new pages are added to
your website or introduced to the AdSense program, our crawlers will
usually get to them within 30 minutes. If you make changes to a page,
however, it may take up to 2 or 3 weeks before the changes are reflected
in our index. Until we are able to crawl your web pages, you may notice
public service ads, for which you will not receive any earnings.

It's better to flesh out
the page before you start displaying ads on it.

Tip #2: Don't be afraid to ask questions

If you're wondering about something, don't be afraid to ask
Google. So far, they've always responded to my questions within
a working day. There are two email addresses to use, depending
on the type of question:

Their responses are always very polite, and they
appreciate getting problem reports and suggestions.

Tip #3: Avoid non-English characters on English pages

This one is a bug, to be honest. My surname is French, and
I prefer to write it out correctly with the accent grave
on the first "e". Every page on my site would then include
at least two accented letters, because my name shows up twice
in the footer. On some pages my name shows up two or three more
times.

Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. But on some pages the
presence of the accented characters is enough to cause AdSense
to display non-relevant ads in French. This happens whether the
browser indicates a preference for French or not. When I reported
this to Google, this is the answer they gave me:

Hello Eric,

Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.

We are currently working as quickly as we can to address this problem. As
soon as we have more information for you, we will email you again.

We appreciate your patience.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Until this is resolved, I've decided to strip out all accents
except on the pages that are actually in French.

Tip #4: Check your keyword density

Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how
they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do
tell us that it's the text content of the page
that matters, not the meta tags. Before serving ads
on a page, then, you might want to check its keyword
density. A good, free tool for doing this is found
here: